Chapter 10
I showered until the water ran cold, standing there letting it beat down on my shoulders like it could wash off everything that had piled up on me since the sun went down.
Mallory’s ugly ass face. That pregnancy test with two lines on it.
Zuri’s confession sitting heavy on my chest. By the time I climbed into bed, my body felt like it had been through a war even though I hadn’t thrown but two good sets of punches all night.
I called River back before I could talk myself out of it.
She picked up on the first ring, already yelling into the phone before I could even get a hello out.
“Are you okay? Girl, what happened? I’ve been sitting here worried sick since you hung up on me talking about you finna send somebody to heaven.”
I let out a breath and gave her the short version, running down everything that happened with Mallory, the gate, the pool house, and everything that spilled out after that.
“And every time you see that hoe,” River said, her voice going flat and serious, “put belt to ass. Simple as that, but don’t kill the girl, it’s not worth all that. You know she lying, right? Now he’s moved on and married, and she’s all of a sudden pregnant. Get the fuck out of here.”
I let out a long sigh, staring up at the ceiling in that dark room.
“I don’t know,” I admitted. “The day I met Kaseem, Mallory was real comfortable in this house. Like she belonged here. And even though he threw her out that same night, I know for a fact at some point they really fucked with each other, heavy. Wasn’t just a random thing.
And if I’m being honest, I don’t know if I could deal with watching him have a child with somebody else. I’m just not built for that.”
River got quiet for a second.
“This is your husband,” she said finally, her voice softer now but still firm. “Not just some nigga you giving up on over a pregnancy test that could be fake as hell for all we know. Everybody got a past, Tatti. Hell, you had one before him too.”
That last part hit different than River meant it to.
It made my mind go straight to my daughter, straight to the secret I’d been carrying so long it had become part of how I lived. And suddenly I knew I couldn’t keep sitting on it, not with everything already coming apart at the seams around me.
“River,” I said, “I need to tell you and Nyla something. Something real big. Something that I’ve been wanting to tell you for years, but I couldn’t. Can we do lunch tomorrow? All three of us, and I’ll tell you then.”
“Now you scaring me,” River said. “What is it?”
“I’ll tell you both together,” I said. “I promise.”
We hung up not long after that, and I laid there in the dark trying to let my body settle into sleep even though my mind wouldn’t shut all the way off.
I was nervous of what my friends would say when I told them about my daughter.
This shit was heavy and it could go either way.
We didn’t hold secrets from one another but my aunt, and my mother made it clear that I couldn’t say a word to a soul about my baby.
I had too much at risk to go against that so for years, I’d carried all the weight by myself.
—
I hadn’t been asleep a full hour when the door swung open to our room and the lights flicked on rough, harsh enough to make me flinch even with my eyes still closed.
“Gone and wake yo ass up, Tattiana,” Kaseem said, walking straight over to where I was laying, standing over me like a man who wasn’t in the mood to hear no or to play games. “This can’t wait. You can rest when we get to the bottom of this shit from earlier.”
I squinted until my eyes adjusted, looking up at him, and the look on his face told me everything I needed to know before he said another word.
He wasn’t playing with my ass tonight. I sat up slow, my heart already pounding hard in my chest, because I knew, sitting there in that bed looking up at him, that tonight was the night I had to come all the way clean.
“Why?” he asked, and his voice cracked in a way I’d never heard from him before.
“Why did you let me build our whole marriage on a lie? You know how hard it was for me to change my ways for you? How hard it was for me to let myself love and trust somebody after a whole lifetime of not doing that for nobody? And this whole time, everything was built on a damn lie. Who the fuck are you?”
“I never intentionally lied to you,” I said, my voice shaking even though I was trying my hardest to keep it steady. “Every single time I tried to tell you the truth, something always got in the way. I swear I was trying, Kaseem. You don’t understand. It’s not as simple as you think it is.”
“Then make me understand. All I see you as is a liar. I hate that shit. Tell me something to make me see shit better because from where I’m standing, I don’t even know where we go next.
” he said. I saw the disappointment in his face, and how close he was to giving up on me.
It was too hard for me to face him right now.
“I’m tired,” I said, feeling the exhaustion of the whole day pressing down on me all at once. “Can we just talk about this in the morning? I’ll sleep in the other room tonight, and we can—”
I tried to get up off the bed and leave the room, but he roughly grabbed me by the collar of my gown before I could even get my feet all the way to the floor and pulled me back.
“Hell nah,” he said. “You don’t get to walk away from me. And you damn sure not sleeping in the next room tonight. You gone sleep yo ass right in here, after you explain what the fuck is going on with you.”
I tried to push him off me, but he caught both my wrists instead and held them above my head, leaning down close enough that I could feel his breath against my face, invading every bit of space I had left.
“I’m being patient with yo ass, Tattiana,” he said, his voice low and shaking with something between anger and heartbreak.
“I really am. But you don’t get to walk away when the heat get put on you.
That’s not what we finna do. You gone tell me what the fuck is going on and why you was scared to take your own seed with you tonight.
Let me help you, but the only way I can do that is if you keep it real.
I’m your protector. Ain’t shit in this life you gotta handle without me by your side.
But if you keep lying to me, keep secrets tucked away from me, how the fuck am I supposed to trust you?
This shit don’t feel good, man. I laid everything out for you.
Every single thing about who I am and what I do.
I let go of shit for you. And you over here still keeping secrets.
As much as I want to be mad, as much as I want to walk away from your ass and get you the fuck away from me, I can’t do that.
My heart is all in the shit, so I’m begging you. Tell me what’s going on.”
Tears started falling down my face and I couldn’t stop them no matter how hard I tried to hold them back.
He wasn’t playing right now, I had to come clean.
I watched this mean ass nigga change for me.
Open up for me, be soft for me and only me.
But I didn’t allow myself to be all in with him for fear of ruining something that felt too good to lose.
Kaseem bit his lip and looked at me tight lipped. His jaw twitching like he was fighting himself, fighting the part of him that wanted to be soft for me in this moment, against the part of him that knew he couldn’t afford to be soft for me right now.
“Stop that fuckin crying and open yo mouth and talk to me,” he said, reaching up and wiping my tears with his thumb before lifting my chin so I had no choice but to look him dead in his eyes.
So I told him everything.
I told him about the summer before my junior year in high school, when my aunt took me in for those few months so that I could have a break from my parents, and they could have a break from me.
That was back when she was still somebody I trusted with my whole heart.
Going to visit her for the summer was always the highlight of my year back then.
She was my favorite aunt who always wanted a daughter, but couldn’t have kids of her own.
So she loved and spoiled me like I was her own during the summers.
I told him about the boy I met that summer, a local kid who’d grown up bouncing through the foster system his whole life.
He had finally found a foster home when he was 14 and had been with the foster mother the last five years.
He told me that he’d aged out a year before I ever laid eyes on him but his foster mother still let him stay with her because she didn’t have it in her to put him out on the street with nowhere to go.
He had a hard life and never really had love, from what he’d told me.
It was something about him that made me change immediately.
I went from being sweet and innocent, to being sneaky.
Anything that he asked me to do, I did it even if I knew it was wrong.
That summer, we grew close and he’d shown me things I never had experience before.
From grown up house parties, cheap dates, late nights that turned intimate, all the stuff a seventeen year old girl wasn’t supposed to be doing but did anyway because he made me feel grown.
Made me feel beautiful in a way ain’t nobody ever made me feel before that summer.
My parents kept me sheltered, so when I got my first taste of freedom, it completely changed me.
I’d lost my virginity to him and started feeling myself.
Every lie and dream he sold me, I was eating that shit up.
In my eyes, he could do no wrong. This caused friction between me and my aunt.
Missing curfew and acting out had became a daily argument.
She had speculations that I had been messing with the boy, but I constantly denied it.